10th Anniversary EMIC Conference: “Knowledge Production in an Age of Geopolitical, Technological, and Planetary Disruptions”

See the 10th EMIC program pdf, 917.2 kB.

Founded in Stockholm in 2016, EMIC is a small, multidisciplinary idea conference that demands neither paper submissions nor conference fees but ideas that are yet to be researched. EMIC took place physically at Stockholm University until 2020, when it started to be running completely online.

Examples of outcomes from earlier EMICs include the book Globalization, Political Economy, Business and Society in Pandemic Times (Fang & Hassler, 2021) and journal special issues/papers such as “The Tech Cold War, the Multipolarization of the World Economy, and IB Research” (Tung et al., 2023), “International Business Under Sanctions” (Meyer et al., 2023), and “Navigating Industrial Policy and Global Value Chains in an Era of Disruptions” (Gereffi et al., 2025).

The theme of the 10th anniversary EMIC conference is “Knowledge Production in an Age of Geopolitical, Technological, and Planetary Disruptions”. Marking a decade of EMIC, the program brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines — including international business, strategy, innovation and technology management, cross-cultural and cross-border management, political economy and geopolitics, diplomacy, global health, media and communication studies, and agricultural and environmental economics — to exchange early-stage ideas on how research can make sense of a rapidly changing world. The conference is organized by the Emerging Markets Cross-Cultural Research Group at SBS.

Professor Tony Fang is Conference Chair and Co-Founder of EMIC. He founded this unique conference together with Professor Jeremy Clegg from the University of Leeds and Professor Fredrik Tell from Uppsala University.

The research community’s response to this 10th-anniversary event has been overwhelming. We are very pleased and honored to welcome speakers ranging from distinguished professors and think tank leaders to early-career scholars from all continents, who will present and share their exciting ideas to inspire interdisciplinary research in the years to come, says Professor Tony Fang, Conference Chair and Co-Founder of EMIC.

Distinguished opening speaker

The 10th EMIC will open with a keynote by Professor Kishore Mahbubani from the National University of Singapore (NUS). A veteran Singaporean diplomat and public intellectual, Professor Mahbubani served two terms as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations and was President of the UN Security Council in 2001 and 2002. He subsequently became the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and is today a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, as well as an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Widely read across the scholarly and policy worlds, he is the author of ten books on Asia, geopolitics, and global governance, including Can Asians Think? (1998), The Great Convergence (2013), Has China Won? (2020), and The Asian 21st Century (2022), which has been downloaded over 4.34 million times. His scholarly output continues unabated: his undiplomatic memoir Living the Asian Century was published by PublicAffairs in 2024, and in 2025 he co-edited the open-access volume Can Asians Think of Peace? Essays on Managing Conflict in the Asian Century (Springer Nature, with Varigonda Kesava Chandra and Kristen Tang).

The two-day program will close with the 10th EMIC Lifetime Achievement Award. The announcement will be made public on the conference opening day, May 7, 2026.

Keynote speech “Emerging civilisations, not emerging markets” by Professor Kishore Mahbubani at the 10th anniversary Emerging Markets Inspiration Conference (EMIC), May 7, 2026

From the 10th Anniversary EMIC Lifetime Achievement Award Session, May 8, 2026

58 speakers at the 10th EMIC Conference

The list below follows the program’s speaking order, with the first speaker listed first.

Professor Kishore Mahbubani (National University of Singapore)
Professor Niina Nummela (University of Turku)
Professor Ke Rong (Tsinghua University)
Professor Nan Jia (University of Southern California)
Professor Michael Witt (King’s College London)
Professor Maja Zalaznik (University of Ljubljana)
Dr. Mattia Pedota (Politecnico di Milano)
Professor Katarina Blomkvist (Uppsala University)
Professor Matevž (Matt) Rašković (Auckland University of Technology)
Professor Miguel Antonio Lim (University of Manchester)
Professor Anthea Zhang (Rice University)
Professor Bryan Jean (National Taiwan University)
Professor Hinrich Voss (University of Bristol)
PhD student Ziqiao Wang (ESCP Business School)
Professor Jens Gammelgaard (Copenhagen Business School)
Professor Ram Mudambi (Temple University)
Professor Qian Cecilia Gu (Georgia State University)
Professor Ivo Zander (Uppsala University)
Professor Daniel Rottig (Florida Gulf Coast University)
Professor Kunal Kamal Kumar (Indian Institute of Management Udaipur)
Professor Prateek Sharma (Indian Institute of Management Udaipur)
Professor Sushanta K. Mishra (Indian Institute of Management Bangalore)
Professor David Zilberman (UC Berkeley)
Professor Michael Hitt (Texas A&M University)
Professor Pervez Ghauri (University of Birmingham)
Professor Fiona Moore (Royal Holloway University of London)
Professor Jing Li (Simon Fraser University)
Professor Gary Knight (Willamette University)
Professor Dan Prud’homme (Florida International University)
Professor Sarianna Lundan (Aalto University)
Professor Nathaniel Boso (University of Pretoria & Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology)
PhD student Siyu Rena Mu (Macquarie University)
Professor Chris Baumann (Macquarie University)
Professor Pascal Lottaz (Kyoto University)
Professor Anna Mia Ekström (Karolinska Institutet)
Professor Peter Ping Li (Copenhagen Business School)
Professor David Fan (RMIT University)
Professor Andrei Panibratov (EMLV Business School Paris)
Professor Hanna Gajewska-De Mattos (University of Leeds)
Professor Fredrik Tell (Uppsala University)
Professor Tony Fang (Stockholm University)
Professor Allan Bird (Goa Institute of Management)
Professor Gabriel Benito (BI – Norwegian Business School)
Professor Dana Minbaeva (King’s College London)
Professor Yuka Fujimoto (Sunway University)
Professor Axèle Giroud (The University of Manchester)
Professor Marcus Larsen (Copenhagen Business School)
Professor Francesco Ciabuschi (Uppsala University)
Professor Chaoying Tang (The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Professor Thomas Lindner (Copenhagen Business School)
Professor Miyase Christensen (Stockholm University)
Professor Xufei Ma (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Professor Chidozie Umeh (University of York)
Professor William Newburry (Florida International University)
Professor Joey van Angeren (VU Amsterdam)
Professor Jorge Manoel Teixeira Carneiro (FGV São Paulo School of Business Administration)
Professor Tailan Chi (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Professor Etel Solingen (UC Irvine)